UC Riverside Developing Space Tomatoes and Other Future Foods

Riverside, CA (August 27, 2024) - Freshly picked tomatoes may soon be on the menu for astronauts orbiting some 260 miles above Earth in the International Space Station.

Growing only a few inches tall, this genetically engineered cherry tomato plant developed at the University of California, Riverside, is now undergoing observations at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and its seeds are in line for a payload flight within the next year or so.

Its voyage will be a generational first: The seeds will germinate in the station’s Advanced Plant Habitat laboratory, produce fruit, and the seeds of that fruit will be planted again to create a second generation of tomatoes grown in space.

“So, it’s going to be a seed-to-a-seed-to-a-seed, which has never been done before in space,” said Robert Jinkerson, an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering.

Yet tomatoes may not be the only fresh produce harvested at the space station. A team led by Jinkerson is also developing a mushroom that can be grown on spaceships. In fact, NASA this month awarded the team $250,000 for a compact system that produces enough mushrooms in the space of a small closet to provide astronauts about 4,000 calories a day.

Learn more about the UCR team’s far-reaching research in the latest issue of UCR Magazine, which features a smorgasbord of food-related research and innovation at the university. Browse the menu for expert insights into entomophagy (eating insects), take a tour of the world-renowned Citrus Variety Collection, learn how UCR-developed foods are making their way from lab to table, and much more.